Blue Shifting (4 page)

(I tried to shut out the vision as Cassandra Quebec was transformed before my eyes into a lacerated carcass – but the image played on in my head.)

Then Maltravers ceased his attack and Cassandra slipped to the floor, and realising what he'd done he fell to his knees, and his remorse swamped me. He saw the crystal, and something – perhaps some insane idea that this was the only way to immortalise his wife
and
her talent – moved him to lift her and lay her to rest on the slab of crystal. She died and gave her dying to the world, and Maltravers was overcome with a weight of guilt and regret that I was slowly coming to realise was my burden also.

I hit the release, tore the crown from my head and sat staring through the dome, weeping at the new order of reality revealed to me. Then I realised what day it was – the twentieth anniversary of Cassandra Quebec's passing – and something, some vague and disturbing premonition, reminded me of Nathaniel Maltravers' obsession with the symmetry of art. I could see, across the oasis in Maltravers' studio, the evil flapping form of the Pterosaur. I pulled myself upright and staggered from the lounge.

I crossed the lawn in a daze of disbelief. I seemed to take an age to reach Maltravers' studio, aware of the terrible fact that my affair with Cassandra Quebec had brought tragedy upon two generations.

Just as I, denied the emotion of grief by my use of mem-erase all those years ago, had been brought here by my sub-conscious for motives of its own – to empathise with Quebec's death on its anniversary, to fall in love again with her through the medium of her daughter? – Maltravers too had been delivered here by his subconscious for its own sinister reasons. He hated women and artists and – as Corrinda happened to be both, as well as a substitute figure for his wife – what greater act of artistic symmetry might there be than a
second
celebrated Nathaniel Maltravers' crystal, twenty years on?

I came to the scimitar support of Maltravers' dome and, sobbing with desperation, hauled open the door. I ran inside and up the escalator, numbed by the knowledge of what I might find.

I was crossing the lounge when I heard Corrinda's scream from the direction of the studio, and my relief that she was still alive was tempered by the knowledge that soon, if her father had his way, she would not be. I heard Maltravers' curse, and the din of things being overturned from within the room. I reached the communicating door and tried to yank it open – but it was locked. Corrinda yelled my name, pleading with me to hurry, and I called in return that I was coming. Through the frosted glass I could make out two indistinct figures circling each other with extreme wariness, and above them the Pterosaur in flight.

I scanned the lounge for something with which to smash the door when I heard another cry: Maltravers, this time – though whether in victory or defeat I could not tell. Then silence. I hefted a carved statue, pitched it through the glass and stepped in after it.

The scene that greeted my eyes was a grotesque tableau, the aftermath of tragic events played out to their conclusion. Maltravers lay on his back on a slab of crystal, his throat slit and his torso, from gullet to abdomen, opened to his spine. Beside him, Corrinda braced herself against the faceted crystal, as if in exhaustion or in silent prayer.

Still gripping the crystal-cutter, she stared at me with eyes burning like emeralds.

"He attacked me," she whispered. "He had it all planned, the crystal set up..."

Only then did I notice the rip in her one-piece and

the bloody gash across her stomach. She stared at the cutter as if seeing it for the first time, then dropped it and reached out to me. "Eva..."

"After all I've done?" I said.

"I
need
you!"

As I took her in my arms, the Pterosaur swooped through the air, alighted on Maltravers' corpse and began picking at the bloody remains.

Corrinda looked at me and, together, we reached out to the crystal and experienced Maltravers' death. We shared his initial shock at the realisation of his end, and then his profound relief that his jealousy and guilt were drawing to a close. We experienced his macabre satisfaction in the symmetry – not quite that which he had planned – that the crystal would come to represent.

Then, in a subtle underlay of emotion, I became aware of Corrinda's contribution to the crystal. I felt her joy that at last she was free, her delight in the irony of creating a work of art at her father's expense.

~

I came to Sapphire Oasis in search of experience, or so I thought at the time.

Piloting

Abbie covered light years in an instant.

She stepped into the telemass portal on Earth and emerged on Nea Kikládhes without breaking her stride. She hurried from the acropolis and paused at the top of the thousand steps carved into the slope of the mountainside. From this elevation she had a perfect view of the archipelago stretching towards the horizon of the waterworld, and the lambent sunset which lasted for hours and was the time when all work ceased and play began. Abbie started down the steps, her ease giving no hint of her apprehension.

~

She strolled along the illuminated boulevard, set with tables at which the Altered, the Augmented and the Omegas disported themselves, waited upon by boosted-primates, chimpanzees and gibbons. She hurried past a group of Altereds, humans who had assumed the partial forms of beasts, extinct or mythical. Zebra-men traded gossip about celebrities with unicorn-women. Other Altereds had kept their human form but for the affectation of fur or scales.

She found a vacant table beside the sea, among a group of her own kind. To a soul, these sophisticates were handsome and well-dressed, of human form and proud of the fact, disdainful of their loud and frivolous neighbours. They wore tasteful cortical implants, spinal addenda which showed only as a knife-edge ridge beneath gown or robe.

Along the boulevard, at some remove from the cyber-assisted clique, sat the dignified Omegas. They were neither Altered or Augmented, and had about them the appearance of great age without infirmity: they were ancient and yet youthful. At the sight of their white gowns, Abbie drew a breath and looked away. Never before had she witnessed so many immortals together in one place.

While she waited, she watched a fish-boy sporting in the shallows. Sleek and silver, he stitched the calm surface of the ocean with dives and leaps. He saw her watching, sprang from the water and landed like a single, errant wave. He was beautifully muscled, with a shock of silver hair, a chevron of gills at his neck and a fin concertinaed against his spine. He sat at the table and drew his thighs to his chest, hugged his shins and regarded Abbie over his knees.

He smiled. "Are you requiring a guide?"

"I'm here on business, not pleasure."

"Are you an artist, here for the Contest? Would you like me to take your proposal to the judges?"

"No," she said, "and no..."

The boy opened his gills and shunted air, as if in derision. "Immortality is the prize. Did you know that? I can't claim to be an artist, but come the Contest I'll be diving."

Abbie nodded politely. She had heard that the caste of immortals occasionally sponsored artistic contests, offering increased longevity for the artists they deemed the finest. Omegas themselves could not create, and she wondered if the sponsorship was an act of amendment for their inability.

The fish-boy cocked his head prettily. "Then why are you here?"

"As I said, on business."

He frowned and scanned the exposed areas of her flesh for sign of augmentations. "Your facility?"

She lifted her dark hair to reveal the plates at the base of her skull. "I'm a Pilot. I've been hired by the artist, Wellard."

His large eyes registered surprise. "Wellard? Mad Wellard, the Primitivist?"

"You know his work?"

"His
work
?" The fish-boy flung back his head in a burst of raucous laughter. "He's a Primitivist! A true primitive – un-Altered, un-Augmented..."

Abbie disliked his arrogance. "The work by him that I've seen – his early work – communicates true emotions, unlike so much art today, clinical, emotionless, without soul."

He rejoined: "Do you understand today's art?"

"Should one have to
understand
it to appreciate it?"

"Today's art is a science, for the literate. Surely, as an Augmented...?"

She began to explain that her facility did not endow her with increased intellection, and in doing so cursed herself for sounding as though she were making excuses for her lack of knowledge.

"Be careful with Wellard," the fish-boy warned. "The rumour is that he keeps his daughter locked in a dome on his island."

Abbie glanced at her watch. Wellard was late.

The fish-boy smiled intuitively. "Wellard drinks heavily," he informed her. "You'll probably have to make your own way there."

He looked out to sea. "Behold, the opening ceremony..." His large eyes regarded the darkening sky with fascination. "See – the Supra-sapiens."

These beings – Abbie had never actually seen one before, merely heard stories – were one step beyond the Omegas. They had divested themselves of their physical forms and assumed identities of pure energy. They were sparkling points of light as capricious as the wind, beholden to no one and to no state or planet.

"Tonight they dance for the Omegas," the fish-boy breathed. "Aren't they... aren't they
beautiful
?"

They choreographed intricate manoeuvres against the indigo heavens. Never still, they trailed images of themselves through the night like comet's tails. Abbie understood that the performance was more than just a display of calculated aesthetics, which at first was all she had assumed it to be. According to one commentator, the trajectories of the dozen Supra-sapiens were, taken in total, the representational math of universal quantum verities.

Then the lights disappeared along every point of the compass, streaking away around the curves of the planet, and their exit presaged the fall of night and the appearance of the Core stars overhead like the brilliant spread of a chandelier.

~

Wellard arrived one hour later.

He approached in his launch from his private island, one of the chain that curved away into the distance like the individual vertebrae of some great fossilised saurian. He moored his vessel at the end of the jetty, then walked towards the boulevard and paused halfway, hands on hips, a sturdy and intimidating silhouette against the starfield. Or was it Abbie alone who divined the threat in his posture as he gazed down at the assembled artists? His arrival had occasioned a murmur of comment.

"From the sublime," the fish-boy said, "to the ridiculous."

Abbie stood. "I must go."

"If you do decide that you need anything..." He held up a communicator on his wrist and gave his code.

Abbie made her way to the jetty. She was aware, as she approached Wellard over the creaking boards of the pier, that she was the centre of attention. It had the effect of making her meeting with the artist all the more fraught.

He glared at her. "Are you the Pilot?" It was almost a roar.

She nodded, unable to look him in the eye. He was squat and powerful, and seemed to emanate a raw animal emotion – in this case animosity – unchecked by the sophistication of alteration or augmentation.

"I requested a male Pilot."

"I was allotted the job-" Which was a lie; she had bribed her superior to give her the commission. "I assure you that I can do what you want just as well as-"

"I've no doubt," he said. His misogyny, according to rumour, had increased during his self-imposed exile on the planet.

He nodded grudgingly. "Very well..."

As she followed him back to the launch and climbed in beside him, Abbie wondered whether her physical revulsion of Wellard was merely because he was a primitive.

The engine fired, lifted the launch and shot them away from the jetty on a long curve paralleling the diminishing islands of the archipelago. Wellard sat at the tiller, staring ahead. In marked contrast to the artists on the boulevard, he was dishevelled and shabbily dressed. It was as if he affected the bohemian persona of an artist from myth to score some personal point against those he regarded as no more than artisans and technicians. His forearms scintillated with crystal dust, like gauntlets, and his square, ruddy face was streaked with belligerent dabs of war-paint. Abbie knew that he was almost sixty, though he appeared older.

Wellard's studio and living quarters comprised three domes suspended over the ocean on a series of cantilevers. He ran the launch aground on a beach beneath the projecting hemisphere of the first dome, and led the way to a spiral staircase which accessed the flat underside.

Abbie was not prepared for the sight of the work of art which rose from the deck to the apex of the studio. The hologram stood perhaps five metres high, a light-sculpture of a beautiful woman. She stood demure and at ease, a Greek Goddess in a flowing gown. Other pieces littered the room, but none so stunning as the raven-haired Mediterranean beauty.

"My wife," Wellard said briefly. "She died almost thirty years ago, giving birth to my daughter. We were living in the wilds of Benson's Landfall at the time, in retreat from contemporary trends." He stopped himself and regarded Abbie, as if resentful at having imparted this information.

She moved around the room, laying hands on crystals, regarding light sculptures. He even worked in the ancient medium of oils on canvas. He watched her from the exit to the second dome, as if impatient to usher her away. "Don't bother telling me what you think – I already know. You Augmented are all the same. You have no appreciation of the truth of the work by the artists you call Primitives."

It was a moment before she could bring herself to reply. She found his attitude of injured pride rather pathetic, like a chided child convinced of his worth. She sought to subdue him with praise.

"On the contrary, I find your work very powerful. I'm moved by it. Few artists these days are so honest, so open – few would admit to their faults and weaknesses. Your guilt is very apparent."

"Art is the communication of true emotion-" He regarded her with what might have been new respect, hedged with suspicion. "Regret and guilt constitute so much of my past. Perhaps by trying to come to terms with the guilt through my work I might cure myself-"

"To find you can no longer create?"

He gave a grudging smile. "Isn't all art a striving for an elusive cure?"

She gazed around at the work in progress and tried to calculate the hours invested in creation. She gestured. "Don't you ever feel like... like giving in?"

His regard of her changed; from wary respect, his eyes showed hostility. He became businesslike. "I am employing you not to ask questions, but to follow my orders to the letter. What I will be asking of you over the next day or so is highly unconventional."

She was surprised. "Piloting?"

"And more. But we'll discuss this later. I will pay you well to undertake my instructions, but you can resign if you so wish."

Abbie smiled, hoping her trepidation was not obvious.

"You must be tired. I'll show you to your room. Tomorrow," he went on, "you will meet my daughter."

Abbie smiled again, conscious of her heartbeat.

~

She awoke the following morning to dazzling sunlight. She had slept well and without interruption, and it was a while before it came to her where she was and what she was doing here.

She showered, found her gown and stood before the clear curve of the dome. She slid open a panel and leaned out, and the beauty of the view was some compensation for her anxiety. In the foreground, below her dome, was Wellard's studio; projecting from it was a semi-circular patio like a stage, directly above the sea. Across the bright blue waters, the next island in the chain was a verdant knoll dotted with residential domes. The sun burned low on the horizon.

As she gazed down, Wellard stepped on to the patio. He was barefoot, wearing only a shapeless pair of trousers. Abbie was about to wave in greeting, but something about his attitude stopped her: he was talking to himself and making wild, angry gestures as if drunk. He leaned over the palisade that encompassed the patio, shook his fist at the sea and shouted something incomprehensible. From a tray on a table beside him he picked up something wet and red and dropped it over the rail. He followed it with another strip of what Abbie took to be meat. This and Wellard's semi-nakedness filled her with revulsion.

As she watched the meat shimmer through the clear blue depths, it was overtaken on the way up by a chain of dancing bubbles. They broke the surface, followed by others. Dimly she made out a dark shape, rising; foreshortened at this angle, it broke the surface and torpedoed towards the overhanging deck. Only when it stood on its tail, its teeth snapping at the strip of meat Wellard held in his fist, was she aware of its full size. It was about five metres long and jet black, with the hydrodynamics of a shark and a mouth perhaps a metre wide. The teeth snapped shut on the meat and the monster backflipped gracefully into the sea. It circled and prepared to launch itself again. Wellard was laughing like a maniac, leaning out over the ocean with another length of meat.

"Soon!" he cried, as the shark-thing rose, hung in suspension at the zenith of its climb, snapped and backflipped. "Soon, you will have your way. Be patient!"

The meat consumed, Wellard turned and made his way unsteadily back into the studio. Abbie ducked out of sight.

She jumped as the chime sounded and Wellard's voice paged her. "Are you awake? Would you care to join me on the patio?"

She found the speaker and, controlling the tremor in her voice, answered that she would be down right away.

~

"It's been light for a good two hours!" Wellard greeted her. "I've been up since dawn. I always do my best work before breakfast." He waved for her to be seated. He had started his meal already. The table was piled with fruit, bread and cheese. Wellard drank from an oversized goblet; he was more than a little tipsy.

"You've been working today?" She thought it wise not to mention the episode with the sea monster.

He winked at her enigmatically. "Just putting the finishing touches to a little project."

As they ate, Wellard expounded on the history of Nea Kikládhes, its discovery and subsequent exploration by the telenauts, and how it became the haunt of the galaxy's richest artists.

Abbie listened politely, sipping fruit juice and taking small bites of honeyed bread. Wellard had changed from the sombre, embittered artist of last night; he was animated now, almost excited. She wondered how much this transformation was due to the wine, how much to a residual elation from his encounter with the shark-thing.